Mapping Babel

From datacentres down to USB keys, if it involves storage, I'll be looking at it.

Jack Clark

Jack Clark has spent the past three years writing about the technical and economic principles that are driving the shift to cloud computing. He's visited data centers on two continents, quizzed senior engineers from Google, Intel and Facebook on the technologies they work on and read more technical papers than you care to name on topics from distributed computing to the ongoing debate over homogenous versus heterogeneous computing architectures. His articles have been quoted by Reuters, highlighted by The Guardian newspaper and syndicated across ZDNet and CNET.

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The Government's online application store, CloudStore, was knocked offline for around five hours on Wednesday due to an outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform-as-a-service.The site, which launched in mid-February, is exclusively hosted on Azure and fell victim to a disruption that hit businesses in the US and Europe.

A component of Windows Azure has experienced a worldwide outage for the past eight hours, preventing customers from carrying out management operations for technology that uses the cloud management service.The worldwide outage of the Windows Azure Service Management technology began at 1:45am GMT on Wednesday and, at the time of writing, Microsoft was in the process of rolling out a fix to deal with the problem.

Intel and Micron have extended their longstanding technology partnership to include emerging memory technologies beyond flash.The companies will work on jointly developing new flash technologies, along with undisclosed emerging memory technologies, they announced on Tuesday.

Dell has been shipping servers based on ARM's RISC architecture chips rather than the industry standard x86 format for some time, the company has revealed to ZDNet UK."I have [ARM] designs I can put my hands on today," Dell's president of enterprise solutions, Brad Anderson, told ZDNet UK.

Scientists have demonstrated a wirelessly powered tiny medical robot that can travel through a person's arteries and veins to provide diagnostics or local medical care.An animation provides an example of how the implant could travel through the bloodstream.

Buyers of HTC's next generation of phones will get free access to 25GB of Dropbox cloud storage, providing a feature already included in Apple's iPhone.Dropbox will be tied into the upcoming HTC Sense 4.

Cisco plans to buy Lightwire, giving the networking giant access to a fast optical interconnect technology.Lightwire employees will be moved into Cisco's Transceiver Modules Group Business Unit and its Supply Chain Operations Group, Cisco announced on Friday.

Facebook is building its own storage hardware and aims to publish details so other companies can make their datacentres more efficient.The designs should become available in May via Facebook-spinoff the Open Compute Project, the company confirmed to ZDNet UK on Friday.

Microsoft is ploughing $130m (£82m) into its huge Dublin datacentre in response to European demand for the company's technology services, it said.The investment will add a further 112,000 square feet of space to the existing 300,000-square foot facility, Stephen McGibbon, Microsoft chief technology officer in EMEA, said on Thursday.

Ubuntu-backer Canonical does not plan to offer a platform-as-a-service service, unlike its open-source rival Red Hat."Canonical doesn't intend to offer a public cloud as part of our business strategy," Jane Silber, the company's chief executive, said on Wednesday.

Amazon has released the Amazon Simple Workflow Service, a technology that further blurs the distinction between public clouds and on-premise hardware.The technology, launched on Wednesday, lets developers automate and manage task workflows.

Ubuntu-backer Canonical has defended its contentious move to the Unity desktop, arguing that the open-source Linux community needs to make design more of a priority."You can't please everybody, but I think it's really important we stood up and did [Unity] and led that charge," Jane Silber, Canonical's chief executive, said on Tuesday.

In the competition for eyeballs, Google plans to sell glasses that stream information about the wearer's surroundings to them in real time.The glasses will sync with a variety of Google services to provide location-specific data and navigation services and should be out by the end of the year, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Greenbytes is getting ready to release a flash storage array that can handle inline deduplication and other tasks, consolidating the job of many SANs onto one for a small-to-medium sized business.The GreenBytes Solidarity solid-state system, announced on Tuesday, is set to be available by the end of March.